Creating Facebook Ads (Part 2) — Making sense of Advert Accounts

Previously, we started our journey on creating a Facebook Ads. If you haven’t read it, go on, we will wait here for you. For those who have done your homework, we will continue to Advert Account.

Advert Account

Advert Account might just be the most important section while creating your Facebook Ads. After you’ve chosen your “Objective”, you will be brought to “Advert Account”.

Setting up an Advert Account

What it is

“Advert Account” gives you the ability to schedule your advert in any time zone of your choice. You can also choose your preferred billing currency.

Pro-tip

Set your advert to the country where the bulk of target audience resides so you can schedule your Facebook Ads to be served accordingly.

Warning: Once your ad goes live, you cannot change the country anymore. I learned this the hard way as I accidentally skipped this page. As a result, my ads were billed in USD and were scheduled on UTC time when I was on GMT+8. I worked around it by converting the time zones, but it was a lot of unnecessary, tedious work.

Advert Set — Audience

Deciding on the Audience for your Advert Set

What it is

“Audience” allows you to create your target audience by selecting fields such as where are the from, their age group, gender and also, the language they speak.

Pro-tip

The best way to fill this section is to have a strong idea of your target audience so as to prevent the ad from showing to people who are out of your target range.

Advert Set — Audience: Detailed targeting

You have the option of fine-tuning your audience profile with fields such as Interest and Behavior. You also have the option to exclude people that you do not want to show the ad by clicking “Exclude people”.

Lastly, you can narrow the audience profile by clicking “Narrow audience”. Narrowing the audience allows you to be very specific in your search.

The last option you have is “Connections”. This is where you can targeting existing followers by either focusing or excluding them. Once you are done, save this audience so you do not need to create them again next time.

Pro-tip

You can set multiple “Narrow audience” to really focus your target to a T. By doing so, you can avoid showing your ads to people who might not be interested in it.

Advert Set — Placement

Facebook Ad Placement location

What it is

This is where you decide where your ad is going to show. For example, which device it shows on, the ad location on Facebook and if the add shows on Instagram.

Pro-tip

You can make this part even more specific such as on what type of mobile this ad shows, in “Advanced Options”. For App creators, this will be the most useful option.

Advert Set — Budget & Schedule

Budget & schedule, the most important section

What it is

This is where you set your budget. You can choose either “Daily” or “Lifetime budget”. You can also choose to run your ad continuously or at a specific start and end date.

The difference between “Daily budget” and “Lifetime budget” is how Facebook will use your money. With “Daily budget”, Facebook will never exceed the amount you placed per day while with “Lifetime budget”, Facebook will decide how to spend your pre-set budget and the ad will end once the budget is used up.

You might notice a greyed out option. This setting allows you to select when you are billed. The default is always impressions. It is locked for some advert types but typically can only be changed after you have spent at least $10 on your ad account.

Pro-tip

Use the starting $10 to test some ads and get a feel for things before increasing your budget.

Advert Set — Budget & Schedule: Bid amount

I usually set this to automatic because to do “Manual Bids”, you will require some pre-existing data to gauge how much you think interactions are worth.

One of my ad stats

I completed an ad before this blog post, the outcome was about 16000 impressions that cost me around $2 within 2 days. If I am to use “Manual Bid”, I would set $0.13 for my “Cost per result”.

Advert Set — Budget & Schedule: Advert scheduling & Delivery Type

“Advert scheduling” allows you to choose the time your ad airs but you can only access this option if you choose “Lifetime budget” you can also choose if the time you set is your time zone or your audience’s time zone.

If your ad is time-sensitive, you might want to choose “Delivery type” allows you to choose how fast your ad is presented. However, it is only accessible if you selected manual bid.

This comes to the end of Advert Accounts. I hope this blog has provided some insight and helped you set your Advert Accounts.

This is the 2nd part of the series on our experience with Facebook Ads. In our next post, we will touch more about Audience size and what affects it.